Dear Data #3: The Third One

Okay. So I’m pretty much a pro at collecting data at this point. Sure I forgot almost every single time to write it down as soon as whatever i’m trying to collect data on actually happens, but I always remember eventually! In all seriousness I’ve really started to enjoy the data visualization process and I’m really thankful to have started on this data journey.

I think I’ve mentioned it before but it’s the visualization part that’s my favorite. I like choosing what gets to represent want and where everything looks best. I feel like a data visualization God. And I know that God loves all of His creatures equally… but I most definitely don’t. This has been my favorite data collection experiment so far.

For my third collection I decided to record every time I complained about something. This is in the same vein of my last experiment where I collected each time I apologized. That project was a little different in that apologizing is sort of ingrained into every woman to the point where we often feel we have to apologize for existing. Whereas complaining is something we’re told to not do (be quiet and be pretty and all that)… but I happen to have a big mouth and that big mouth complains quite a bit.

Or at least I thought it did! Looking at my data for the week I noticed some interesting patterns.

In my week of data collection I could only recount 22 instances of complaining. That averages to about three per day, which is way different from my expected 300 per day. I also didn’t realize how often I complained to my coworkers, but I suppose when you spend 8 hours with somebody you don’t really know, complaining about how shitty the weather is is sometimes the only thing you can think to say.

I wasn’t surprised by how often I was complaining about things that don’t really matter, people have told me I can be slightly, how you say, dramatique. This means that I shouldn’t have been very surprised that only once I was looking for a solution to my problems, whether it had a significant subject or not.

But, I was. Was I expecting people to offer up a solution to fix the rain? No. But, maybe something else? I’m not sure if offering up a “but it’s great for the plants” or a “at least we won’t get sunburnt today” counts as solutions, but people don’t really have anything to say when you have random, meaningless complaints.

I’m sort of sad that I don’t have an excuse now to collect random data. I want to try to do this on my own time, or at least browse the Dear Data website more frequently. I somehow managed to transform 3/3 of my Dear Data experiments into self-help projects, so I wonder what else I could do with some more time and new ideas.